Ok, so some of the commons license templates are more solid than others, but the file you refer to used license  Template:Flickr-no known copyright restrictions [1] , The deletion of the template was discussed to death here [2], but there was no consensus.  It would be good to have a list of such templates. A query searching for templates used by files in that directory which transclude {{License template tag}} should do it, but I do not think I can create it with a CatScan3 tool. We do have ~1.5k license templates [3] (that number includes customized templates build from  more generic ones), and some of them are very rarely used, so it would be good to look at them again.

 

About asking uploaders to add infoboxes. This idea come from 2 things: desire to get more people involved and uploaders are often interested in improving their files, and desire to simplify life of bot writers. I do not think it is possible to write a bot to get it always right. For example https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:AJ_3101_ant.jpg file just says {{GFDL}} and what is in the image and there is no information about who took the picture or even if the uploader thought the subject of the photo was GFDL or the photograph itself. Same with https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ajokoirat.png I do not know if it is a GFDL because it was copied from a website claiming GFDL or because author who upload it chose that license. By the way those files definitely do not meet current standards but in 2006 they were not unusual. If any of those guys are still around it would be nice if they could clean it up, because we can not guess those things.

 

Jarek T.

(user:Jarekt)

 

[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Flickr-no_known_copyright_restrictions

[2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/Template:Flickr-no_known_copyright_restrictions

[3] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jarekt/f

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Guillaume Paumier [mailto:gpaumier@wikimedia.org]
Sent: Friday, December 12, 2014 3:57 PM
To: commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Cc: Tuszynski, Jarek W.; Coordination of technology deployments across languages/projects
Subject: Re: [Commons-l] File metadata cleanup drive: We now have numbers for Commons

 

Hi,

 

Thank you for sharing your thoughts, Jarek :)

 

Le vendredi 12 décembre 2014, 03:44:54 Tuszynski, Jarek W. a écrit :

> So all the files in Category:Files with no machine-readable

> license<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Files_with_no_mach

> ine-r eadable_license> need work to be done with licenses, not files.

> I do not know what machine-readable metadata is needed but I can help

> with adding them.

 

Yes, many of those are tricky because there isn't necessarily a "real" license attached to them (example: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:

%22A_Basket_full_of_Wool%22_(6360159381).jpg ) or the license isn't specific enough.

 

There are similar discussions at

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:File_metadata_cleanup_drive#How_to_handle_.22and_future_versions.22_cases

and

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:File_metadata_cleanup_drive#.22Presumed_Public_domain.22

and the best we might be able to do is to come up with a list of such cases and ask our wonderful lawyers how to handle them :)

> 2)      Your number of files missing machine-readable metadata on Commons:

> ~533,000,  seems a bit low. According to

> Special:MostTranscludedPages<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Specia

> l:Mos

> tTranscludedPages> there are 24,136,218 files with licenses ({{License

> template

> tag<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:License_template_tag>}

> }‏‎), and 23,452,741 files with infobox templates ({{Information}} or

> {{Infobox template

> tag<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Infobox_template_tag>‏

> ‎}}, so I would expect 683,477 files without any infobox templates.

 

There are currently ~677,674 files* without any of the following templates:

 

'Information','Painting', 'Blason-fr-en', 'Blason-fr-en-it', 'Blason-xx', 'COAInformation', 'Artwork', 'Art_Photo','Photograph', 'Book', 'Map', 'Musical_work', 'Specimen'

 

If this list in incomplete (it probably is) or incorrect, let me know.

 

*Source: https://tools.wmflabs.org/mrmetadata/commons_list.txt (warning, 18MB text file).

 

But some of those do have machine-readable metadata picked up by CommonsMetadata even if they don't have an infobox, which brings the number down to ~533,000. It can be that they have templates we're not listing yet, or that they have MR metadata in their EXIF data. Some of the latter are false positives, per https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T73719

 

> 3)      As I mentioned on

> Commons:Bots/Work_requests#An_example_pattern<https://commons.wikimedi

> a.org /wiki/Commons:Bots/Work_requests#An_example_pattern> I would

> like to first give the original uploaders a chance to fix the files.

> We can do that by writing a standard message, which without any threat

> of deletion, ask for help with bringing their files up to current

> standards.

 

I'm not opposed to this in principle, but I'm not sure I see the value. We're not going to delete files, or change attribution, or anything like that; we're only going to take the existing information and put it into a template so it's easier to access.

 

My assumption is that most uploaders wouldn't care about such a change in formatting, and that it would entail more work for them to figure out how to do it themselves, than for a few bot owners to do it on a wider scale.

 

Is this assumption unreasonable?

 

> 4)      At some point I started adding such files to [[Category:Media

> missing infobox

> template<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Media_missing_inf

> obox_

> template>]] for better tracking and started sub-categorizing them into

> a.       Files with OTRS

>

> b.      Files with {{information}} template which have some parsing issues

>

> c.       Files with {{PD-Art}} which should use {{Artwork}} template and

> where the name of the uploader, upload date, and even source might not

> be relevant

> d.      Files using PD license, like PD-old (except PD-Author or PD-User):

> for those files it might also the name of the uploader, upload date,

> and even source might not be relevant

> It might be easier to add infoboxes for different groups of files. For

> example Magnus'

> add_information.php<http://toolserver.org/%7Emagnus/add_information.ph

> p> tool does not work well for artworks. We also seem to have users

> that specialize in different subjects and it might be easier to get

> their attention with smaller groups of files of one type.

 

Thank you for doing this! I think these will be great starting points for specific bot runs :)

 

--

Guillaume Paumier